Explores the relationship between voting in elections and rooting for sports teams in the United States.

Americans have spoken of candidates “running” for office and of elections as “races” for so long that we no longer hear the sports metaphor. In Rooting Interests, cultural historian David Henkin takes the metaphor seriously. Since the 1830s, when American elections became mass spectacles staged before an unprecedented electorate, voting and rooting have grown up together, alongside horse racing, prizefighting, and baseball. Fans and voters alike know their single preference will almost never decide the outcome, yet they bet, brag, wear the colors, bask in reflected glory, and blame the coach. From Van Buren’s invention of the mass party through Progressive reform, women’s suffrage, and today’s red-and-blue map, Henkin traces a durable structure of partisan feeling that binds strangers to party labels across generations. If voters now behave more like fans, it is not because politics has been trivialized into sport, but because they care more and switch sides less.